Books from Finland - A literary journal of writing from and about Finland.

The famous Nokia rubber boots. CC BY-SA 3.0

What are your favourite weird facts about Finland?

Personally, at Books from Finland, we like the ones about language – no is a verb, the personal pronoun is ungendered (there is no ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘it’, just hän), there are fourteen or fifteen (depending how you count them) cases for nouns.

But, in a country that’s keen on the national this and the national that (composer, writer, epic), it’s also cool that we have a de facto national app (Angry Birds).

Now, FinnFacts, in collaboration with the bookings website expedia.fi, has come up with an image of Finland, entitled ‘The surprising truth about Finland’, with a whole lot more.

We’ve all read the press coverage of the fact that speeding fines are linked to what you earn. The largest fine so far is €116,000.

But how about this? One that has, amazingly, passed us by. Any Finnish noun can have over 2000 different forms.

And this: Finland is the first country to make a broadband connection a legal right.

Or this: Finns are the world’s biggest coffee drinkers, drinking a staggering four times more than Brits. And that’s despite the fact that Starbucks etc. are far from ubiquitous in Finland.

Or – did you know that the (national!) mobile phone company, Nokia, started life as a manufacturer of rubber boots and tyres?

You can check out this and much more here.